Canadian Songwriter, Producer, Composer

Dan Reid recently did a remix of Watching You Sleep from Thanks To Science, We’ve Got Love. It’s quite a bit heavier and got a lot more swagger than the original. I like it. You can download it for free here (in exchange for your email address for the mailing list).

The Listening Project shares some technical (and creative) DNA with another BBC project I’ve mentioned before which is close to my heart, BBC Introducing. The Introducing Uploader was another project I was proud to project manage in 2011 through a platform migration on BBC infrastructure. BBC Introducing actually won Gold the same Academy Award in 2011. I wasn’t credited on that one but The Listening Project folks were kind enough to include me in their nomination this year. Thanks guys & good luck!

Long time friend, drummer and collaborator, Rob Greenway, has just released a new recording under the name of Greenway Blvd! On Naked Splendor are 13 songs of original songs and covers with a more accessible/pop bent differing greatly from Rob’s other act, Brilliantfish (which is considerably darker in a more neo-industrial way).

I’m telling you this because my guitar playing is on a few of these tracks and I also co-wrote one of the songs (“Conditional“) with Rob a little while back. I think it’s a good album and if you like my stuff, you’ll probably like Greenway Blvd too.

You can listen to the whole album for free, streaming on Bandcamp or buy it if you like it!

Zunior.com is an excellent Canadian-based digital music store where you can get music in high quality MP3 format or as lossless FLAC files as well as the album artwork (you can even have a CD delivered to your front door). Zunior is run by Dave Ullrich (you may know him as the drummer from the Juno-nominated indie rock band, The Inbreds).

Let me tell you a little about this song I entered into the CBC Seachlight contest…

“Not The Same (Without You Here)” is sung from the perspective of someone who has lost their partner and is reminiscing aloud in the hopes that they’re being heard. Kind of “love echoing through the halls of time”. Sure, there are thousands of songs like this but this one’s my take.

My dad died just recently and I was thinking of my mum when I wrote it. If anyone has lost a loved one, you know how it can leave you lost, disoriented, without anyone to talk to, and basically wondering what the hell happened and why. You can cry for weeks without anything getting better. Hopefully, at some point there comes a time when you realize the sun is shining and it’s just snowed a shitload and you’re transported back to distant memories. Remembering still makes you cry, but somehow it’s slightly better. Stating baldly like that sounds awkward, arch and sentimental. However, the song doesn’t seem to cross over into that…which is why it works.

It’s is a simple song with a country lilt to it. I don’t write many country-feel tunes, but it seemed to fit the ethos. More than that, it’s a song that means something, can be related to by almost anyone and conveys it well. This is why I entered into this “contest”.

Fun fact: it was written and recorded in the afternoon on Dec. 20, 2012. I don’t usually keep track of when (or where) I write songs but I built in “the day before the end of the world” into it so it would stick.

Okay, a final word about the Searchlight contest: I won’t be surprised if I don’t win this because it’s actually set up as a contest not of “the hunt for Canada’s best new artist” but a contest of who can harangue their legions of friends/followers through social media to vote for them every day for the next several weeks. I love the CBC, but this is not the “artist search” it’s being touted as (I’m not bitter, just seems disingenuous, especially to the non-entrants who listen to the radio every day and think this is what their tax dollars are doing…but I digress). Having said that, I would like this song to be heard by more than just 5 people and I know that if every one of you were to click that link once a day it might happen.